[Mb-civic] Terror's Greatest Recruitment Tool

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Published on Friday, August 12, 2005 by The Nation
Terror's Greatest Recruitment Tool
by Naomi Klein
 http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0812-21.htm

Hussain Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in 
London's failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators 
that they prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in 
Iraq," La Repubblica reported. "Especially those where women and 
children were being killed and exterminated by British and American 
soldiers...of widows, mothers and daughters that cry."

It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror 
because of its politically correct antiracism. Yet Osman's comments 
suggest that what propelled at least some of the bombers was rage at 
what they saw as extreme racism. And what else can we call the 
belief--so prevalent we barely notice it--that American and European 
lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much 
more that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted?

It's not the first time that this kind of raw inequality has bred extremism. 
Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the intellectual 
architect of radical political Islam, had his ideological epiphany while 
studying in the United States. The puritanical scholar was shocked by 
Colorado's licentious women, it's true, but more significant was Qutb's 
encounter with what he later described as America's "evil and fanatic 
racial discrimination." By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States 
in 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel. He witnessed an 
America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent 
refugees by the Zionist project. For Qutb, it wasn't politics, it was an 
assault on his identity: Clearly Americans believed that Arab lives were 
worth far less than those of European Jews. According to Yvonne 
Haddad, a professor of history at Georgetown University, this 
experience "left Qutb with a bitterness he was never able to shake."

When Qutb returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, 
leading to his next life-changing event: He was arrested, severely 
tortured and convicted of antigovernment conspiracy in an absurd 
show trial. Qutb's political theory was profoundly shaped by torture. Not 
only did he regard his torturers as sub-human, he stretched that 
categorization to include the entire state that ordered this brutality, 
including the practicing Muslims who passively lent their support to 
Nasser's regime.

Qutb's vast category of subhumans allowed his disciples to justify the 
killing of "infidels"--now practically everyone--in the name of Islam. A 
movement for an Islamic state was transformed into a violent ideology 
that would lay the intellectual groundwork for Al Qaeda. In other words, 
so-called Islamist terrorism was "home grown" in the West long before 
the July 7 attacks--from its inception it was the quintessentially modern 
progeny of Colorado's casual racism and Cairo's concentration camps.

Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks 
that ignited Qutb's world-changing rage are currently being doused 
with gasoline: Arabs and Muslims are being debased in torture 
chambers around the world and their deaths are being discounted in 
simultaneous colonial wars, at the same time that graphic digital 
evidence of these losses and humiliations is available to anyone with a 
computer. And once again, this lethal cocktail of racism and torture is 
burning through the veins of angry young men. As Qutb's past and 
Osman's present reveal, it's not our tolerance for multiculturalism that 
fuels terrorism; it's our tolerance for the barbarism committed in our 
name.

Into this explosive environment has stepped Tony Blair, determined to 
sell two of the main causes of terror as its cure. He intends to deport 
more Muslims to countries where they will likely face torture. And he 
will keep fighting wars in which soldiers don't know the names of the 
towns they are leveling. (According to an August 5 Knight Ridder 
report, a Marine sergeant in Iraq recently pumped up his squad by 
telling them that "these will be the good old days, when you 
brought...death and destruction to--what the fuck is this place called?" 
Someone piped in helpfully, "Haqlaniyah.")

Meanwhile, in Britain, there is no shortage of the "evil and fanatic racial 
discrimination" that Qutb denounced. "Of course too there have been 
isolated and unacceptable acts of a racial or religious hatred," Blair 
said before unveiling his terror-fighting plan. "But they have been 
isolated." Isolated? The Islamic Human Rights Commission received 
320 complaints of racist attacks in the wake of the bombings; the 
Monitoring Group has received eighty-three emergency calls; Scotland 
Yard says hate crimes are up 600 percent from this time last year. Not 
that pre-July 7 was anything to brag about: "One in five of Britain's 
ethnic minority voters say that they considered leaving Britain because 
of racial intolerance," according to a Guardian poll in March.

This last statistic shows that the brand of multiculturalism practiced in 
Britain (and France, Germany, Canada...) has little to do with genuine 
equality. It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking 
politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one that keeps 
ethnic minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral ghettos while 
the centers of public life remain largely unaffected by the seismic shifts 
in the national ethnic makeup. Nothing exposes the shallowness of this 
alleged tolerance more than the speed with which Muslim communities 
are now being told to "get out" (to quote Tory MP Gerald Howarth) in 
the name of core national values.

The real problem is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If the 
diversity now ghettoized on the margins of Western societies--
geographically and psychologically--were truly allowed to migrate to the 
centers, it might infuse public life in the West with a powerful new 
humanism. If we had deeply multi-ethnic societies, rather than shallow 
multicultural ones, it would be much more difficult for politicians to sign 
deportation orders sending Algerian asylum-seekers to torture, or to 
wage wars in which only the invaders' dead are counted. A society that 
truly lived its values of equality and human rights, at home and abroad, 
would have another benefit too. It would rob terrorists of what has 
always been their greatest recruitment tool: our racism.

© 2005 The Nation


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